Trump ordered that the term Homo sapiens be changed to Hetero sapiens. In history books and on websites, the airplane from which the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima will no longer be identified as the Enola Gay, but rather the Enola Straight. Trump also ordered billionaire Mark Cuban, who supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, to change his name to Mark American. If he does not do so, he will be charged with terrorism.   read more

As good government organizations noted, had the senators not announced their votes, the public would have been left in the dark. “When you afford lawmakers the ability to hide how they voted, no one can hold them accountable,” Joe Newman, communications director for the Project On Government Oversight, told Roll Call. The Senate Intelligence Committee had been the only Congressional committee that didn’t disclose voting positions.   read more

Officials say the use of the tag-based FasTrak electronic toll system will save money, with estimates varying from $8 million to more than $19 million over the next eight years. Drivers, including visitors, will have the option of having their license plates photographed and then pay online or by mail. “I think what it is, sometimes we are the first, if not the only smile they get in the morning,” toll collector Jackie Dean told The New York Times.   read more

The Georgia senators claim the border was wrongly set up, based on a flawed survey conducted in 1818 that placed the 35th parallel, the border between the two states, one mile south of its actual location. Fixing the snafu, they maintain, would only put things as they should have been all along. The resolution offers Tennessee 66.5 miles of land that legally belongs to Georgia in exchange for the return of the 1.5-mile waterway.   read more

The Air Force actually relies more heavily on piloted aircraft to conduct airstrikes, with drones responsible for only about one-quarter of missiles fired. The U.S. has killed between 3,049 and 4,376 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including at least 179 children. Parents who have seen their children killed by U.S. bombs don’t care if the person who pushed the button that released the bomb were inside an airplane or in a control room thousands of miles away.   read more

Fisher applied for admission to the university in 2008, when stiff competition meant that students who graduated in the top 10% of their class got 92% of the spots reserved for Texans. But Fisher was ineligible for the “Top Ten” admission program because her grades simply weren’t good enough—and she is not challenging her failure to meet these requirements. Instead, Fisher says she should have gotten one of the remaining slots, for which competition was particularly ferocious.   read more

Among its other transgressions, JPMorgan has been found to have • misled investors • engaged in fictitious trades • collected illegal flood insurance commissions • wrongfully foreclosed on soldiers, charged veterans hidden fees for refinancing • violated the Federal Trade commission Act by making false statements to people seeking automobile loans • illegally increased their collection of overdraft fees by processing large transactions before smaller ones   read more

During these incidents, 26 people were killed, with two-thirds of the accidents occurring on farms, including four incidents involving workers younger than 16. Grain bin suffocation deaths have averaged ten a year for the past 50 years.   read more

Last year, a new policy went into effect that requires retailers to report thefts under $50 by mail instead of by telephone or in person. The result of this change is that many business owners just stopped telling law enforcement about shoplifters. Not surprisingly, police statistics for 2012 showed petty shoplifting had plummeted by 75%, from ten reports a day to less than three.   read more

Hunt said, “The database of useless information is 500 million gigabytes, the database of useful information is 5K. Our problem is, which 5K?” “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,” Hunt said. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of fundamentally trying to collect everything and hang on to it forever, forever being in quotes of course.”   read more

Making drought conditions even worse, NOAA predicts hotter than usual temperatures across most of the continental U.S. and northern Alaska, with below-normal temperatures predicted only for the Pacific Northwest and northern Great Plains. Last year was the hottest year since recordkeeping began more than 100 years, with several weeks in a row of 100-plus-degree days and high temperature records shattered across the country. Yet there will be water—just not where we want it.   read more

All together, Republicans spent about $1.4 billion to win the White House and the Democrats $1.1 billion. The Republicans also outspent the Democrats in Congressional races, $1.66 billion to $1.54 billion. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, pro-Romney forces alone spent at least $492 million on TV ads, 91% of which were negative. The pro-Obama team laid out at least $404 for TV ads, 85% negative.   read more

The general public overwhelmingly supported spending more money on social security, health care and homeland security, while the super rich believed that the budgets for all three should be cut. The super rich were also more likely to oppose increased spending for defense, environmental protection and education. But they were somewhat more likely to call for increasing the budget for scientific research.   read more

After first promising to put her on a plane to New York, where she was born and lived with her parents, CBP agents later told her father they could not return her to “illegals,” and gave him one hour to choose between having her sent back to Guatemala or to an “adoption center.” Fearing he would lose his child forever, and not knowing that CBP’s threats were illegal, Mr. Ruiz chose Guatemala.   read more

The Fourth Amendment does protect against unauthorized surveillance or searches, and there are laws on the books that address spying by companies, for instance. But these legal protections were crafted long before drones came into existence. Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said, “Just because the government may comply with the Constitution does not mean they should be able to constantly surveil, like Big Brother.”   read more

In 1994, Congress passed a bill that forbids most people who are the subject of a permanent protective order from possessing firearms. However the law is rarely enforced, with less than 50 cases in all of 2012. This means that for practical purposes, each state makes its own laws. Currently, only a handful of states require gun owners to give up their weapons if a restraining order is placed on them by the courts.   read more

In the case of SNL, prime contractor Sandia Corp., which relies heavily on subcontractors, spending about 38% of its total budget on them, hired former employees as subcontractors and paid them a higher hourly rate than the employees had received prior to retiring.   read more